Hypsipyle

Queen of Lemnos in the generation before the Argonauts, the only woman on the island to spare a man. When the Lemnian women rose up and murdered every husband, father, and son in vengeance for years of neglect, Hypsipyle hid her old father Thoas and set him adrift in a hollow chest to escape by sea. A year later the Argo put in at Lemnos and she received Jason as consort in the palace, and only the nagging of Heracles at the ship finally pulled the crew back to sea (Apollonius *Argonautica* 1.609-909). After the Argonauts left she was driven from Lemnos by the women who learned she had spared her father, captured by pirates, and sold to King Lycurgus of Nemea, in whose household she became nurse to the infant Opheltes; when she set the baby on a bed of wild parsley to show the marching Seven the spring at Nemea a serpent killed him — the omen Amphiaraus read as the doom of the expedition, and the death that founded the Nemean Games (Apollodorus *Bibliotheca* 3.6.4; Bacchylides 9.10–24; Statius *Thebaid* 4.717–5.752).

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